The front page of Saturday’s New York Times featured a picture of a crowd of 10,000 Islamists rallying in Tharir Square in Cairo hoping to show a force of support for an Islamic state. Sunday’s New York Times featured an article on a young couple who were jailed and fearful for their lives in Afghanistan because they had the gall to fall in love and the desire to be together forever in the face of a culture where marriages are arranged and center around family obligation. The thread that tied these two stories was twofold, religiosity and the continued oppression of women in many Islamic nations.
In the same spot where Egyptians gathered to protest for freedom from an regime that did not support their views, 10,000 men gathered in support of laws that would effectively mean women might not receive the same freedoms as their male Egyptian counterparts, such as freedom of speech, freedom to assemble peaceably. Freedoms that only a few months before had so successfully overturned a long standing dictatorship and given women hope for a new future.
The story of the couple is one that many newspapers, including the New York Times, have been writing about for years. Honor killings and mutilations have been well documented and all of them include the same core premise, that women are to be cloistered and treated like treasured property. Even the smallest dent or scratch, that is, even a minor indiscretion in the eyes of others, can lead to cruel punishment for anyone involved. Punishment often endorsed by the families of the “perpetrators”. Blood relations who before had wanted to protect and cherish, soon turn into tearful acceptance that only spilling blood and causing pain can cancel out the shame of a women who has shown she desires freedom, in this case not political freedom, but the freedom to love.
Women will play an important role in the transformation of the Middle East to an area of human rights, better economies, and open politics. When half the population cannot work, see doctors, be educated, how can a state hope to gain any of the above. So while many Americans and many in the world would like to remove ourselves from the politics of the Middle East, get our noses out of others business, out of other’s civil disputes, and get our pocket books back to issues back home, it is a short-sighted goal. Countless women were oppressed and murdered in Islamic countries before the world took closer notice after September 11th, 2001. And after the “War on Terror” is long over, unless women’s rights are given their due importance, more women will be oppressed and murdered and the Middle East will never grow more peaceful, prosperous, and free.
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